Programmer, engineer, USAF avionics veteran, trail runner, BJJ, triplets dad. Sharing what I learn about AI, software, security, and technology.
Oregon
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Replacing a Honeywell VisionPRO IAQ with an ecobee isn’t a normal thermostat swap. The hidden EIM changes everything. I documented the wiring, configuration, testing, and setup:
absent.org/replace-honeywell…
Inspired by @DanielLockyer, today I chose violence.
I let @ChatGPT walk me through replacing a proprietary Honeywell thermostat system with an @Ecobee Smart Thermostat Enhanced that I got for free from @nwnatural
That meant:
• bypassing the Honeywell EIM 💀
• rewiring the furnace control board
• reconnecting the outdoor condenser
• testing every stage (heat, A/C, fan)
I labeled everything and double-checked every step before making changes, but ChatGPT never led me astray.
The actual wiring and installation process took 20 minutes. The system is now fully operational. 💪
I’ve been wanting to do this for YEARS. Today, AI made a project that felt well beyond my comfort zone approachable.
AMA. Photos below. I did a temp job with some butt connectors, but have some proper Wago 221 connectors arriving Wednesday.
ALT Before, with labels
ALT After, with temp butt connectors.
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Sorry but most of these are fake.
Theoretically, yes. In reality, no.
My iPhone got stolen. The thief plugged it in to charge.
That second, the front camera took a photo and emailed it to me with the exact GPS location.
Not a third-party app. A built-in automation I set up in 5 minutes using the Shortcuts app that comes on every iPhone.
The thief's face. The address where my phone was charging. In my inbox. Before the thief even unlocked the screen.
I showed the photo and location to the police. They recovered the phone the same day.
A cybersecurity consultant who sets up this automation for every client said: "This is the most effective anti-theft setup on any smartphone and 99% of iPhone users have never configured it. It takes 5 minutes. It uses the Shortcuts app that's already on your iPhone. It runs silently. And it catches the one thing every thief eventually does: plug the phone in to charge."
He showed me 9 more iPhone anti-theft features most people never activate Stolen Device Protection, Find My network tracking, Activation Lock, Lost Mode, a trigger-word automation that works from any phone, and 4 other settings that make a stolen iPhone nearly useless to a thief and nearly guaranteed to come back to you.
"Every iPhone has a $1,000+ anti-theft security system built in. Most owners have configured zero of it. They lose the phone. They panic. They wish they'd spent the 15 minutes it takes to set everything up. Don't be that person."
Here's the complete anti-theft setup step by step 🧵
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My 2 cents, having successfully recovered at least 3 iPhones since 2020:
1. Ensure Find My is enabled on your device.
2. If it's stolen, use icloud.com/find/ in a desktop browser to track the device, because it is way more reliable than the Find My app and you'll get location hits that won't even report in the mobile app.
3. Then, TRUST the data it gives you.
The other stuff is nice, but just means your iPhone will get sold to some service where your iPhone is sent to China and parted out.
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"I love Rust! Rust is amazing ...if you never, ever, EVER have to look at it yourself." — @dhh
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He's right. Unfortunately, I decided to learn it so that I could QA/QC the things being written by bots - and I'm glad I did because they mess it up a lot.
They're scary good with Bash, Python and Go, not as much Rust 🤣
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I just think you need to have some epistemic humility
Most important development in computing in 20 years comes along, and the exact stack you’ve been working on that whole time happens to be the perfect stack for the next 20 years? OK.
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You are right but it also feels short-sighted? You have the most powerful tool you ever had, you have become a 1000x maker, and you can't think of how to make your stack 10x better?
Yes, Rust is fast, the type system catches bugs, but there is so much beyond it.
* Why not make Ruby 10x faster?
* Why not make Ruby (and therefore Rails) really great at concurrency?
* Why not add a banging type system to Ruby that can provide guarantees beyond Rust?
* Why not embed SQLite3 into Rails with a replication protocol so you can really compress the stack beyond a single server?
* How to preemptively fix most bugs from the most critical parts of Rails, such as database pools?
Yes, who cares about ActiveSearch, but there are so many ways we can fundamentally improve our stacks that go beyond asking the agent to just crap out code. Phoenix is still the only framework that ships with presence, because it turns out it is deceptively a hard problem to solve correctly, but somehow all issues are solved?
I understand some folks have no interest in doing any of the above, and that's fine, but then at least pass the baton to the people who want to do exactly that.
PS: I say all of this with love ❤️
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@codejake retweeted
Saturn through the eyepiece just now - wait until the zoom-in.
Great conditions from southern UK (although feeling very muggy!)
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Say what you will about Windows (OS), but the NT kernel really is an engineering marvel that still puts Linux to shame in many ways.
The quickest way to describe it for a programmer, is NT was more like an object-oriented language, with a strong security model from day one, whereas Linux is very…not.
A lot of the “good” features in Linux feel bolted-on (SELinux, Capabilities, Namespaces) because…well they were. I love to imagine an alternate history where NT won.
IMO, Microsoft *should* have made an “Open NT” in the early 2000s; not fully GPL-style open, but one where a large org could say…swap out a memory allocator for their own. (they sorta did this with limited source access, but it was too restrictive)
You could imagine say…an early Amazon forking OpenNT to create an “AmazonNT” for EC2, where they have a modified scheduler, network stack, whatever. But, the security+compatibility contract keeps a stable baseline on the Microsoft side.
Controversial take, but if we enter this era where users are giving AI agents increasingly higher levels of access control; the Linux kernel is legitimately a poor fit. Think about it; answer the question “What exactly is this AI agent allowed to do?”
On Standard Linux, it’s disgustingly messy with lots of overlap.
Do you use UIDs? GIDs? ACLs? CGROUPs? Policies? SELinux? Filesystem modes? There’s not a singular coherent graph of capabilities you can point to. Too many ways you can escape an initially narrow scope.
NT, by comparison, can go the route of explicitly typed resources, and then you could have these really strong centralized audit trails when an agent goes haywire…etc.
I know I’m rambling, but the point is…if you were greenfielding an OS kernel from scratch, in 2026, with the intent of being forward-looking, it would *not* look like Linux. Frankly, it’d probably look a lot closer to NT, or even a BSD fork…
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Hypothetical question. Your grandson wants to see Morrissey, bad. Which is the official family musician. Do you let him cut classes for 2 days to do it. Is so do roy tell his parents?
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He definitely should cut classes for the experience. Don’t tell @HackingDave though.
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💧 For years I was brought up in the Netherlands being told we had the "best tap water in the world"
"The Americans are silly for buying bottles of mineral water, you can just drink from the tap!"
I remember the same sentiment with my German friends
When I stayed at the VOCO hotel in The Hague a few months ago, there were no water bottles but a paper note saying "Do like the locals do! Drink from the tap"
Now it turns out Dutch tap water is and probably was full of toxic chemicals and plastics
Today actually we finally installed a Reverse Osmosis (RO) system in our home (or well the plumber did) by Waterdrop (unaffiliated, unpaid, recommended by Claude)
RO seems to the best and most pure water filtration system out there
I will let you know how the coffee tastes tomorrow with it! 😋
More than third of tap water exceeds limit for toxic chemicals; worst in Noord-Holland dlvr.it/TVb9w4
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GirayHan
for the past few months, i’ve been fiddling with this app i’m building called rdltr.app /read • later/ to keep track of all the stuff i want to read. i use it a ton, dozens of times a day, to save anything cool that comes my way. on weekends i take a couple of hours to sit down and read. no tabs to track down, just a queue with links. read one and it clears from the list. keep going until there's none left.
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What do you don't like about Tinycast at all? I am looking for some genuine negative feedbacks. I will see what I can do about that.
also please ⭐ on GitHub if you haven't, it keeps me motivated
github.com/abue-ammar/tinyca…
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Googlebook is officially here! I’ve been so excited to share the details with the world.
Today, many of us rely heavily on laptops to get work done, but we think there is an opportunity to rethink the category to address the needs of people today. So we brought the best of ChromeOS and Android to create a new platform for laptops.
Our initial focus with Googlebook is to deliver an amazing laptop that feels awesome for Android phone users.
Here’s what to know about Googlebook 🧵👇
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add some potassium too. I buy it in the states called "no salt" and add it to my water with salt.
Be warned though, raw potassium tastes absolutely disgusting.
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Lite Salt is better. Roughly half salt, half potassium. Not gross like No Salt.
a.co/d/02M9Z8tl
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